Originally published 11/23/2011If you look at the pictures of our shop, you'll see three presses: a 6-4 Hopkins, a 4-4 Hopkins, and a 6-6 Harco, the last of which we've almost exclusively used as our powerhouse press for low-registration high-quantity jobs, while the Hopkins presses have been relied on for their finesse. Now, the Harco is certainly capable of such finesse, but because of it's age (it's old) it's become a bit clunky and limited by some of its design features, most notably the sideclamps, which rely on four posts to stabilize the screens into place. The problem with the four posts is that the screen moves too much when tightening any of the posts, making setup take forever on jobs requiring a high level of accuracy. We like how the Hopkins presses have a bar that stabilizes the screen instead of the posts, so we made a modification to modernize our sideclamps a bit (more after the break).

The third picture is of the Hopkins setup, where two posts are lowered to lay a bar across the screen, and the first two pictures are of our modification to make the sideclamps on the Harco more like what we have on the hopkins. It only requires about $5 worth of materials. Just cut a piece of metal (your choice as to what kind) to the length and width of your sideclamp and weld the bar onto the posts, making registration a breeze! Now the Harco is capable of quick and easy registration for difficult printing jobs.

We also took apart and greased up our sideclamp microregistration to make it a lot more streamlined (we used to have to use a wrench to get them to move . . . ). With a press this old, finetuning becomes a regular part of the maintenance, but if you keep up with it you can keep the press running well for years to come.

One final note: I know that modern sideclamps already have such a bar, but this method costs several hundred dollars less for the same effect.